SALEM, Ore. – Like a plastic bag caught in a tree or a foam beer cooler floating down a river, abandoned shopping carts are usually seen as a blight on the landscape – rusting away in overgrown lots and in ditches across the country.
“When you are seeing them in droves, in fives and tens, you start to feel like ‘Is that our national shrub?’” said Kate Tarter, chairwoman of the Northgate Neighborhood Association in Salem. She once counted more than 30 abandoned shopping carts in a mile-long stretch.
Several state legislatures have made efforts to get stray carts off the streets. New Jersey is considering a bill that would give grocers three business days to retrieve carts or they would be impounded. In California, state law requires cities and grocers to work together to retrieve carts, and anyone who tries to steal one can be fined $100.
A bill in the Oregon Legislature also seeks to rid stray carts from the landscape.
Sponsored by state Sen. Laurie Monnes Anderson, D-Gresham, the legislation would require grocers to post a sign on each cart identifying the store it belongs to, its address and a toll-free number for reporting abandoned carts.
Oregon municipalities would be invited to participate and grocers would collectively fund retrieval services. Grocers choosing to opt out of the plan could be fined $50 for carts that are called in but not picked up.
Joe Gilliam, president of the Northwest Grocery Association, says the legislation would save grocers money by getting stray carts back into stores.
Shopping carts cost between $100 and $300. Grocers in Salem and Portland alone say 3,500 carts are stolen each week, some of which are returned or retrieved.
“It’s like chasing wild steers. You find them, put them on a trailer and bring them back to the ranch,” Gilliam said.
Monnes Anderson said she’s received e-mails from as far away as Japan and Germany suggesting ways to reduce the number of abandoned shopping carts.
“There are no loose shopping carts roaming the Champs-Elysees,” wrote a person who had lived in Paris.
Tarter surmises that most abandoned shopping carts are taken by car-less people who use them to ferry groceries home.
Advocates for the homeless caution that the bill should not be used to commandeer shopping carts away from homeless people.
“A shopping cart to a homeless person is like a Cadillac,” said Michael Stoops, executive director of the National Coalition for Homeless. “It’s really helpful to you when you are on the street.”
Abandoned carts also are used for less functional purposes, such as urban Iditarods – races where groups of people pull a shopping cart around while dressed up as Spanish bullfighters or diaper-wearing astronauts, for instance.
Julian Montague, an artist in Buffalo, N.Y., photographed thousands of abandoned carts for his book, “The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification.”
“I’ve been looking at these things so long they’ve really become part of this natural rhythm of the urban landscape,” he said.
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